The George Polk Awards in Journalism are a series of American journalism awards presented annually by Long Island University in New York in the United States.

The awards were established in 1948 in memory of George Polk, a CBS correspondent who was killed covering the Greek Civil War. In 2009, John Darnton was named curator of the George Polk Awards.^[1]

See List of George Polk Award winners for the recipients of the award.^[2]

Josh Marshall's blog, Talking Points Memo, was the first blog to receive the Polk Award in 2008 for their reporting on the US Attorney Scandal.^[3]

Categories[link]

• Foreign Reporting
• Radio Reporting
• Photojournalism
• Economics Reporting
• Business Reporting
• Labor Reporting
• Legal Reporting
• National Reporting
• Internet Reporting
• Magazine Reporting
• State Reporting
• Education Reporting
• Local Reporting
• Television Reporting

In addition, the George Polk Career Award is given in recognition of an individual's lifelong achievements.

References[link]

George Polk (17 October 1913, Fort Worth, Texas - May 1948) was an American journalist for CBS who disappeared in Greece and was found dead a few days later on Sunday May 16, 1948, shot at point-blank range in the back of the head, and with hands and feet tied. Polk was covering the civil war in Greece between the right wing government and communists and had been critical of both sides. He alleged that a few officials in the Greek government had embezzled up to $250,000 in foreign aid (equivalent to $2.3 million in 2011 dollars) from the Truman Administration, a charge that was never proved.

He had been particularly outspoken in his criticism of the Truman government's unqualified support for the rightist authoritarian regime in Greece. In the late 1970s, the story emerged as to how AMAG (American Mission for Aid to Greece) authorities helped the Greek police frame two young communists for his death.^{[citation needed]}

A communist journalist, Gregorios Staktopoulos, was tried and convicted of helping Vaggelis Vasvanas and Adam Mouzenidis, members of the illegal communist army, commit the murder. The communist guerilla radio station stated that Adam Mouzenidis was already killed in an aerial bombing by the Hellenic Air Force when Polk was murdered. Staktopoulos himself maintained that the confession that led to his conviction was obtained through torture, and in fact it was later revealed that Adam Mouzenidis arrived at Salonica, where he was allegedly introduced to Polk, two days after Polk's murder, and Vasvanas was not in Greece at the time.^{[citation needed]} An investigation by James G.M. Kellis (also known as Killis), a former OSS officer with knowledge of Greek political circles and power brokers, concluded that Greek communist circles lacked the power and influence to commit the murder and cover it up. Kellis worked on contract for the Wall Street law firm of William 'Wild Bill' Donovan, the former head of OSS, who was hired by journalist Walter Lippman to investigate the case. Following Kellis' conclusion that it was more likely Polk had been murdered by right-wing groups within or affiliated to the Greek government, the investigation was halted and Kellis recalled to Washington. At the time the US government was financially supporting the Greek government mainly to prevent a communist take-over of the country. The Greek government had been supported by the British Government throughout 1941-1945 but this became an impossibility after the war.

Polk had married Rea (also known as Rhea) Coccins (Kokkonis), a Greek national and ex-stewardess, seven months prior to his death. They had no children. After being allegedly harassed and threatened by the Greek government, Rea fled to the U.S. where she was debriefed by Donovan's law firm. She became friendly with Barbara Colby, the wife of William Colby, a former OSS officer attached to Donovan's firm, who later would become director of the CIA.

Reporters in New York city started a fundraising project to send an independent investigation committee to Greece, and from this effort the newsmen's commission was formed. Members included Ernest Hemingway, William Polk (Polk's brother), William A. Price (his cousin) and Homer Bigart. This was soon however eclipsed in media coverage by the Lippman Committee, consisting mostly of Washington journalists with Walter Lippman as chairman and James Reston of the New York Times.

Within months of his death, a group of American journalists instigated the George Polk Awards for outstanding radio or television journalism. These awards were modeled after the Pulitzer Prize which is awarded for outstanding print journalism in newspapers.

Criticism[link]

In February 2007, Polk's "status as a symbol of journalistic integrity" was challenged by historian Richard Frank, who concluded that Polk made false claims about his service record in World War II. Frank examined the claim, repeated by Edward R. Murrow, that Polk had commanded a unit of 119 Marines on Guadacanal, flew a fighter plane that shot down 11 Japanese aircraft, and won a Purple Heart. He concluded that it is not consistent with the available documentation. Frank said, "the inescapable conclusion is that George Polk did not simply verbally recount false tales of his wartime exploits to his family and to his journalist colleagues, he actually forged documents to buttress his stories." ^[1]

George Polk's brother, William, replied to this attack, which he called slanderous, in a letter to the Guardian Monday March 19, 2007. http://media.guardian.co.uk/mediaguardian/story/0,,2036930,00.html He pointed out that Frank did not discuss a single article Polk ever wrote and that his military record is amply substantiated in a range of military documents, including a picture of Polk being decorated by Vice-Admiral John McCain on November 30, 1943, on behalf of the "Airplane Cruiser Detachment for their heroic role during the Battle for the Solomons." A more detailed reply can be found at http://www.williampolk.com/pdf/2007/open%20letter%20to%20winners%20of%20the%20geo%20polk.pdf

In April 2007, Frank responded to William Polk's letters and to what he considered a baffling silence from journalists that greeted his charges: http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/013/506hdoal.asp

On October 5, 2007, the United States Postal Service announced that it would honor five journalists of the 20th century times with first-class rate postage stamps, to be issued on Tuesday, April 22, 2008: Martha Gellhorn, John Hersey, George Polk, Rubén Salazar, and Eric Sevareid.^[2] Postmaster General Jack Potter announced the stamp series at the Associated Press Managing Editors Meeting in Washington.

George Polk grew up in Fort Worth, Texas. He was a 1938 graduate of the University of Alaska.

References[link]

1. ^ George Polk's Real World War II Record: The fictional career of a famous newsman. Richard B. Frank, Weekly Standard, Feb 16, 2007
2. ^ The Associated Press (2007). "Stamps Honor Distinguished Journalists". The Associated Press. http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hoKyKa1Uf3XnvACJMu-M5Rt99DCgD8S3ANR00. Retrieved October 18, 2007. 

• Prados, John (2003). Last Crusader: The Secret Wars Of CIA Director William Colby. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-512847-8.
• Bernhard, Nancy E (1999). U.S. Television News and Cold War Propaganda, 1947-1960. Cambridge University Press.
• Keeley, Edmund (1989). The Salonika Bay Murder: Cold War Politics and the Polk Affair. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey.
• Marton, Kati (1990). The Polk Conspiracy: Murder and Cover-Up in the Case of CBS News Correspondent George Polk. Farrar Straus and Giroux, New York.
• Unger, Sanford (1990). "The Case of the Inconvenient Correspondent", Columbia Journalism Review 29 (November/December 1990).
• Vlanton, Elias, and Zak Mettger (1996). Who Killed George Polk? The Press Covers Up a Death in the Family. Temple University Press, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Related articles and links[link]

• George Polk Awards
• Cold War
• Greece
• William Joseph Donovan
• Walter Lippman
• Frank Polk

External links[link]

• Seattle.indymedia.org at seattle.indymedia.org
• Who Killed George Polk? at www.vlanton.com
• http://www.routledge-ny.com/radio/polk.pdf
• Democracy Now! | The Story of George Polk at www.democracynow.org
• http://dlib.nyu.edu:8083/tamwagead/servlet/SaxonServlet?source=/newsmens.xml&style=/saxon01t2002.xsl&part=body^{[dead link]}
• http://sup.kathimerini.gr/xtra/media/files/kathimerini/pdf/meletigiapolk.pdf

Wilbert Rideau
Born	(1942-02-13) February 13, 1942 (age 70)

Wilbert Rideau (born February 13, 1942) is a former death row inmate in Louisiana, as well as an author and award-winning prison journalist. Rideau was initially convicted of murder and served time in the Louisiana State Penitentiary (Angola). He was released in 2005 after being retried and convicted of the lesser charge of manslaughter.

A Life magazine article in March 1993 referred to Rideau as "the most rehabilitated prisoner in America."^[1] While in prison, Rideau edited a prison magazine called The Angolite. He has also written several books and compilations.

Imprisonment[link]

Louisiana State Penitentiary, where Rideau was incarcerated

Rideau was incarcerated in Louisiana State Penitentiary (better known as Angola Prison) from 1961 to 2000, convicted in three successive trials by all-white, all-male juries of murdering bank teller Julia Ferguson in the aftermath of a bank robbery. A fourth trial in 2005, before a mixed-race jury of ten women and two men, resulted in a conviction of manslaughter, for which he was sentenced to 21 years. Since he had already served nearly 44 years for the bank robbery and killing, he was freed immediately.^[2]

Legal history of the case[link]

Rideau’s criminal case, which dates from the pre-Civil Rights era, is widely studied in law schools for the landmark decision made by the United States Supreme Court concerning pretrial publicity.^[3] The Court overturned Rideau’s 1961 conviction because the local television station, together with local law enforcement officials, filmed an “interview” with the teenager and repeatedly broadcast it, resulting in what the Court called “Kangaroo Court proceedings.” Rideau was retried in 1964 and 1970; each of those convictions was also overturned because of constitutional violations. He won a new trial after 40 years incarceration because black people were excluded from the 1961 grand jury that indicted him on the murder charges.^[4]

Rideau’s trials and convictions split the Lake Charles, Louisiana, community along racial lines for four decades, even to the fourth and final trial in 2005, when white spectators sat behind the prosecutor’s table and those seated behind the defense were primarily black.^[5][6]

Rideau had always admitted robbing the bank, fleeing with the employees, and killing one of them. The final trial pitted the prosecution’s 40-year-old version of events, which held that Rideau lined up his victims before shooting them and that Ferguson begged for her life, against the defense’s contention that Rideau reacted impulsively - first, when a phone call interrupted the robbery, and then when employee Dora McCain jumped from the car and ran and the other two employees followed suit, and that the killing was done in panic rather than premeditatively. The defense successfully challenged elements in the prosecution’s version to the satisfaction of the jury.^[5][7]

Childhood[link]

This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (October 2010)

When he was six, Rideau's family moved to Lake Charles, Louisiana (a city about 30 miles from the Texas border on Interstate 10). He attended the all-black Second Ward Elementary School. Rideau was born into poverty and, when his parents later divorced, he became even poorer. He transferred to W.O. Boston Colored High School when he was in eighth grade and soon started skipping class attendance. At 13, Rideau got a job at a grocery store and eventually stopped going to school. He had just turned 19 when he committed the bank robbery and killing that would take him to Angola penitentiary for more than four decades.^{[citation needed]}

Rideau spent 12 years on death row for killing Ferguson until the U.S. Supreme Court, in its 1972 Furman v. Georgia^[8] ruling, abolished the death penalty as it was then applied. Rideau, like all other condemned in Louisiana, had his sentence judicially amended to life imprisonment for the crimes by the Louisiana Supreme Court.

Prison journalism[link]

In the early 1970s, Rideau wrote a column, "The Jungle", for a chain of black weeklies in Louisiana.^{[9][page needed]} He freelanced articles to mainstream media, including The Shreveport Journal^[10] and Penthouse.^[11] A headline referred to him as the "The Wordman of Angola", saying "Rideau is Angola Penitentiary's Birdman of Alcatraz. He is a prisoner who has transformed the dark, drab, terror-filled life of prison into a greenhouse for the flowering of his talent."^[12] He had not gone beyond the ninth grade in his formal education before his arrest and incarceration.^[13]

In 1975, a federal court ordered the Angola prison to be reformed, and the outgoing warden appointed Rideau editor of The Angolite. The incoming warden ratified the choice and, with a handshake, gave Rideau freedom from censorship and thus created the nation’s only uncensored prison publication.^[14] Rideau became well known during the 25 years he was an editor of The Angolite. He became the first African American prison newspaper editor in the United States.^[15]

In 1979, Rideau and co-editor Billy Sinclair won the George Polk Award for the articles "The Other Side of Murder" and "Prison: a Sexual Jungle".^[13][16][17] In addition, the magazine won the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel Award,^[17] and a 1981 Sidney Hillman Award.^[18] The Angolite was the first prison publication ever to be nominated for a National Magazine Award, for which it was nominated seven times.^[19] Rideau traveled the state as a lecturer accompanied only by an unarmed guard and was permitted to fly to Washington, D.C. twice to address the nation's newspaper editors on the subject of prison journalism.^{[20][clarification needed]}

Rideau and co-editor Wikberg were named “Person of the Week” for their journalism on Peter Jennings's World News Tonight in August 1992.^[21]

Books and compilations[link]

Rideau wrote In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment and Deliverance, recalling his experiences in Angola.^[22] It won the 2011 Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

Rideau edited "The Wall Is Strong: Corrections in Louisiana," a University of Southwestern Louisiana composition of magazine and newspaper articles and papers from the Center for Criminal Justice Research of the university. About half of the book's articles originated from The Angolite.^[23] Rideau composed the book with former Angolite associate-editor Ron Wikberg and University of Louisiana at Lafayette Professor Burk Foster. It is still in use today in Louisiana.^{[citation needed]}

Rideau and Wikberg also collaborated on Life Sentences, a 1992 anthology of articles from The Angolite, now out of print.^[24] It was published in 1992 by Times Books, a subsidiary of Random House.^[22]

Other works[link]

In the 1990s, Rideau branched out into radio, television, and documentary film making, becoming a correspondent for National Public Radio, producing a segment for ABC-TV’s newsmagazine Day One; pairing up with radio documentarian Dave Isay for “Tossing Away the Keys,” and helping to create and produce two films, Final Judgment: The Execution of Antonio James and The Farm, which was nominated for an Academy Award.^[25]

Clemency efforts[link]

Mother Jones stated "a mix of racial politics and tough-on-crime posturing blocked [Rideau's] release for more than three decades" even though several LSP wardens said that Rideau was completely rehabilitated.^[26] Rideau remained incarcerated by the mid-1990s, while other inmates with similar sentences had been paroled. An investigation by 20/20 uncovered statements by Governor of Louisiana Edwin Edwards; Edwards said that he believed that Rideau was rehabilitated, but he said that he would not release Rideau under any circumstances.^[27] Rideau said that governors did not advocate for his release because he became "a political football" and that it would be difficult for a prisoner in that state to be released from prison."^[26]

Release and post-release[link]

In December 2000, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans threw out Rideau’s 1970 murder conviction based on grounds of racial discrimination in the grand jury process in Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana. To the surprise of many outside of the area, the Calcasieu Parish prosecutor decided to try Rideau for a fourth time. Rideau was re-indicted in July 2001, and was freed in 2005 after a jury verdict where Rideau was found guilty of manslaughter. Whereas he had been represented by local court-appointed attorneys in his first three trials, his defense team in 2005 included criminal defense icon Johnnie Cochran, nationally renowned civil rights attorney George Kendall, and famed New Orleans defense attorney Julian Murray, who all worked on the case for free.

As with every American trial, this one was prosecuted under the laws in effect at the time of the crime in 1961. The jury was free to convict Rideau of murder – the state elected to prosecute under the “specific intent” rather than the “felony murder” doctrine of the 1961 statute – or manslaughter, which in Louisiana is any homicide that would otherwise be murder if it is either committed without specific intent to harm an individual, or if it is committed in the heat of passion such as the panic the defense argued Rideau was in.^[28]

Shortly after Rideau’s release, Judge David Ritchie, who had declared Rideau indigent at trial, ordered him to pay over $127,000 to the court to cover the cost of the trial and conviction that ultimately freed him based on prison time already served. This order was overturned by the Louisiana Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.^[29] The Louisiana Court of Appeals stated:

[ . . . ] we find the trial court lacked legal authority to act for the parish of Calcasieu and lacked standing in its own right to seek recoupment of funds expended from the Criminal Court Fund. The trial court, however, retains authority to enforce the January 15, 2005 sentence which ordered Rideau to pay costs and to assess reasonable costs upon presentment by the parties who actually "incurred" the Article 887(A) expenses, consistent with this opinion and the Constitutions of Louisiana and the United States. We also vacate that portion of the March 15, 2005 Order directing Rideau to reimburse the IDB [Indigent Defender's Board] for all costs, expert witness fees and expenses associated with his defense.^[30]

Rideau is one of the speakers at the 2011 Newark Peace Education Summit in Newark, New Jersey.^[31]

References[link]

External links[link]

	Louisiana portal
	Biography portal
	Journalism portal
	Crime portal

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Wilbert Rideau

• [1], [2], [3] from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund
• wilbertrideau.com, Wilbert Rideau site by Linda LaBranche, including links to articles written by Rideau
• The Twomey Center for Peace Through Justice, at Loyola University of New Orleans
• Wilbert Rideau at the Internet Movie Database
• Interview with Philip Adams, ABC Radio National, Late Night Live 5 January 2011

Seymour Hersh
Seymour Hersh, Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas, April 2008
Born	(1937-04-08) April 8, 1937 (age 75) Chicago, Illinois, United States
Alma mater	University of Chicago
Occupation	Journalist
Spouse	Elizabeth Sarah Klein
Awards	Polk Award (1969, 1973, 1974, 1981, 2004)[1][2] Pulitzer Prize (1970)[3] George Orwell Award (2004)[4]

Seymour (Sy) Myron Hersh (born April 8, 1937) is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and author based in Washington, D.C. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine on military and security matters. He has also won two National Magazine Awards and is a "five-time Polk winner and recipient of the 2004 George Orwell Award."^[5]

He first gained worldwide recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. His 2004 reports on the US military's mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison gained much attention.

Early years[link]

Hersh was born in Chicago to Yiddish-speaking Lithuanian Jewish parents who immigrated to the US from Lithuania and Poland and ran a dry-cleaning shop in the far west side neighborhood of Chicago, called Austin. After graduating from the University of Chicago, with a history degree Hersh found himself struggling to find a job. He began working at a Walgreens before being accepted into University of Chicago Law School but was soon expelled for poor grades.^[6] After returning for a short time to Walgreens, Hersh began his career in journalism as a police reporter for the City News Bureau in 1959. He later became a correspondent for United Press International in South Dakota. In 1963, he went on to become a Chicago and Washington correspondent for the Associated Press. While working in Washington Hersh first met and befriended I. F. Stone whose I. F. Stone's Weekly would serve as an initial inspiration for Hersh's later work. It was during this time that Hersh began to form his investigative style, often walking out of regimented press briefings at the Pentagon and seeking out one on one interviews with high ranking officers. After a falling out with the AP over their refusal to run a story on the US government's work on biological and chemical weapons Hersh left the AP and sold his story to The New Republic. During the 1968 presidential election, he served as press secretary for the campaign of Senator Eugene McCarthy.

Vietnam and the New York Times[link]

After leaving the McCarthy campaign, Hersh returned to journalism as a freelancer covering the Vietnam War. In 1969, Hersh received a tip from Geoffrey Cowan of The Village Voice regarding an Army lieutenant being court-martialled for killing civilians in Vietnam. His subsequent investigation, sold to the Dispatch News Service, was run in thirty-three newspapers and exposed the My Lai massacre, winning him the Pulitzer Prize in 1970.^[6][7]

In 1972, Hersh was hired as a reporter for the Washington bureau of The New York Times, where he served from 1972 to 1975 and again in 1979. In 1975, Hersh was active in the investigation and reporting of Project Azorian (which he called Project Jennifer), the Central Intelligence Agency's clandestine effort to raise a Soviet submarine using the Howard Hughes' Glomar Explorer.

After the New York Times[link]

His 1983 book The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House won him the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times book prize in biography. In 1985, Hersh contributed to the PBS television documentary Buying the Bomb. In 1993 Hersh became a regular contributor to The New Yorker.^[8]

Hersh has appeared regularly on the Democracy Now! show.^[9]

Selected stories[link]

My Lai Massacre[link]

On November 12, 1969, Hersh broke the story of the My Lai Massacre, in which hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians were murdered by US soldiers in March 1968.^[10] The report prompted widespread condemnation around the world and reduced public support for the Vietnam War in the United States. The explosive news of the massacre fueled the outrage of the US peace movement, which demanded the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam. Hersh wrote about the massacre and its cover-up in My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath and Cover-up: The Army's Secret Investigation of the Massacre at My Lai 4. A movie was produced, based on this book, by Italian director Paolo Bertola in 2009.^[11]

Project Jennifer[link]

In early 1974, Hersh had planned to publish a story on Project Jennifer, the code name for a CIA project to recover a sunken Soviet navy submarine from the floor of the Pacific Ocean. Bill Kovach, The New York Times Washington, DC bureau chief at the time, said in 2005 that the government offered a convincing argument to delay publication in early 1974—exposure at that time, while the project was ongoing, "would have caused an international incident." The NYT eventually published its account in 1975, after a story appeared in the Los Angeles Times, and included a five-paragraph explanation of the many twists and turns in the path to publication. It is unclear what, if any, action was taken by the Soviet Union after learning of the story.

KAL 007[link]

In his 1986 book The Target is Destroyed (Random House), Hersh alleged that the Soviet shooting down of Korean Air Flight 007 in September 1983 was due to a combination of Soviet incompetence and United States intelligence operations intended to confuse Soviet responses.

Later releases of government information confirmed that there was a PSYOPS campaign against the Soviet Union that had been in place from the first few months of the Reagan administration. This campaign included the largest US Pacific Fleet exercise ever held, in April to May 1983. The report states that the Soviets, "probably didn't know (KAL 007) was a civilian aircraft" and uses Hersh's book as a reference for the PSYOPS campaign.^[12]

Mordechai Vanunu and Robert Maxwell[link]

In his 1991 book The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy, Hersh wrote that Nicholas Davies, the foreign editor of The Daily Mirror, had tipped off the Israeli embassy in London about whistle-blower Mordechai Vanunu. Vanunu had given information about Israel's nuclear weapons program first to The Sunday Times and later to the Sunday Mirror. At the time, the Sunday Mirror and its sibling newspaper, the Daily Mirror were owned by media magnate Robert Maxwell who was alleged to have had contacts with Israel's intelligence services. According to Hersh, Davies had also worked for the Mossad. Vanunu was later lured by Mossad from London to Rome, kidnapped, returned to Israel, and sentenced to 18 years in jail. Davies and Maxwell published an anti-Vanunu story that was claimed to be part of a disinformation campaign on behalf of the Israeli government.^[13]

Hersh repeated the allegations during a press conference held in London to publicize his book. No British newspaper would publish the allegations because of Maxwell's famed litigiousness. However, two British MPs raised the matter in the House of Commons, which meant that British newspapers were able to report what had been said without fear of being sued for libel. Maxwell called the claims "ludicrous, a total invention". He fired Nick Davies shortly thereafter.^[14]

Attack on pharmaceutical factory in Sudan[link]

On August 20, 1998, Hersh strongly criticized the destruction of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory, the largest pharmaceutical factory in Sudan—providing about half the medicines produced in Sudan—by United States cruise missiles during Bill Clinton's presidency.^[15]

Iraq[link]

Hersh has written a series of articles for The New Yorker magazine detailing military and security matters surrounding the US-led invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. In March 2002 he described the planning process for a new invasion of Iraq that had been on-going since the end of the First Gulf War, under the leadership of Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Fried and other neo-conservatives. In a 2004 article, he alleged that Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld circumvented the normal intelligence analysis function of the CIA in their quest to make the case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Another article, Lunch with the Chairman, led Richard Perle, a subject of the article, to call Hersh the "closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist."^[16]

A March 7, 2007 article entitled, "The Redirection" described the recent shift in the George W. Bush administration's Iraq policy, the goal of which is to "contain" Iran. Hersh points out that, "a by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda."^[17]

In May 2004, Hersh published a series of articles which described the treatment of detainees by US military police at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, Iraq.^[18] The articles included allegations that private military contractors contributed to prisoner mistreatment and that intelligence agencies such as the CIA ordered torture in order to break prisoners for interrogations. They also alleged that torture is a usual practice in other US-run prisons as well, e.g., in Bagram Theater Internment Facility and Guantanamo. In subsequent articles, Hersh claimed that the abuses were part of a secret interrogation program, known as "Copper Green". According to Hersh's sources, the program was expanded to Iraq with the direct approval of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, both in an attempt to deal with the growing insurgency there and as part of "Rumsfeld's long-standing desire to wrest control of America's clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A."^[19] Much of his material for these articles was based on the Army's own internal investigations.^[20]

Scott Ritter points out in his October 19, 2005 interview with Seymour Hersh that the US policy to remove Iraqi president Saddam Hussein from power started with US president George H. W. Bush in August 1990. Ritter concludes from public remarks by President Bush and Secretary of State James Baker that the Iraq sanctions would only be lifted when Hussein was removed from power. The justification for sanctions was disarmament. The CIA offered the opinion that containing Hussein for six months would result in the collapse of his regime. This policy resulted in the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

MR. HERSH: One of the things about your book that's amazing is that it's not only about the Bush Administration, and if there are any villains in this book, they include Sandy Berger, who was Clinton's national security advisor, and Madeleine Albright.

Another thing that's breathtaking about this book is the amount of new stories and new information. Scott describes in detail and with named sources, basically, a two or three-year run of the American government undercutting the inspection process. In your view, during those years, '91 to'98, particularly the last three years, was the United States interested in disarming Iraq?

MR. RITTER: Well, the fact of the matter is the United States was never interested in disarming Iraq. The whole Security Council resolution that created the UN weapons inspections and called upon Iraq to disarm was focused on one thing and one thing only, and that is a vehicle for the maintenance of economic sanctions that were imposed in August 1990 linked to the liberation of Kuwait. We liberated Kuwait, I participated in that conflict. And one would think, therefore, the sanctions should be lifted.

The United States needed to find a vehicle to continue to contain Saddam because the CIA said all we have to do is wait six months and Saddam is going to collapse on his own volition. That vehicle is sanctions. They needed a justification; the justification was disarmament. They drafted a Chapter 7 resolution of the United Nations Security Council calling for the disarmament of Iraq and saying in Paragraph 14 that if Iraq complies, sanctions will be lifted. Within months of this resolution being passed--and the United States drafted and voted in favor of this resolution--within months, the President, George Herbert Walker Bush, and his Secretary of State, James Baker, are saying publicly, not privately, publicly that even if Iraq complies with its obligation to disarm, economic sanctions will be maintained until which time Saddam Hussein is removed from power.

That is proof positive that disarmament was only useful insofar as it contained through the maintenance of sanctions and facilitated regime change. It was never about disarmament, it was never about getting rid of weapons of mass destruction. It started with George Herbert Walker Bush, and it was a policy continued through eight years of the Clinton presidency, and then brought us to this current disastrous course of action under the current Bush Administration.^[21]

Iran[link]

In January 2005, Hersh alleged that the US was conducting covert operations in Iran to identify targets for possible strikes. Hersh also claimed that Pakistan and the United States have struck a "Khan-for-Iran" deal in which Washington will look the other way at Pakistan's nuclear transgressions and not demand handing over of its nuclear proliferator A Q Khan, in return for Islamabad's cooperation in neutralising Iran's nuclear plans. This was also denied by officials of the governments of the US and Pakistan.

In the April 17, 2006 issue of The New Yorker,^[22] Hersh reported on the Bush administration's purported plans for an air strike on Iran. Of particular note in his article is that a US nuclear first strike (possibly using the B61-11 bunker-buster nuclear weapon) is under consideration to eliminate underground Iranian uranium enrichment facilities. In response, President Bush cited Hersh's reportage as "wild speculation." ^[23]

When, in October 2007, asked on presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's hawkish views on Iran, Hersh claimed that Jewish donations were the main reason for these:

During one journalism conference, Hersh claimed that after the Strait of Hormuz incident, members of the Bush administration met in vice president Dick Cheney's office to consider methods of initiating a war with Iran. One idea considered was staging a false flag operation involving the use of Navy SEALs dressed as Iranian PT boaters who would engage in a firefight with US ships. This idea was shot down. This claim has not been verified.^[25]

Lebanon[link]

In August 2006, in an article in The New Yorker, Hersh claimed that the White House gave the green light for the Israeli government to execute an attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon. Supposedly, communication between the Israeli government and the US government about this came as early as two months in advance of the capture of two Israeli soldiers and the killing of eight others by Hezbollah prior to the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict in July 2006.^[26] The US government denied these claims.^[27]

Criticism[link]

Kennedy research[link]

Hersh's 1997 book about John F. Kennedy, The Dark Side of Camelot, made a number of controversial assertions about the former president, including that he had had a "first marriage" to a woman named Durie Malcolm that was never terminated, that he had been a semi-regular narcotics user, that he had a close working relationship with mob boss Sam Giancana which supposedly included vote fraud in one or two crucial states in the 1960 presidential election. For many of these claims, Hersh relied only on hearsay collected decades after the event. In a Los Angeles Times review, Edward Jay Epstein cast doubt on these and other assertions, writing, "this book turns out to be, alas, more about the deficiencies of investigative journalism than about the deficiencies of John F. Kennedy."^[28] Responding to the book, historian and former Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. called Hersh "the most gullible investigative reporter I've ever encountered."^[29]

Hersh repeatedly described Kennedy as a playboy and implied that many journalists were aware of his womanizing but turned a blind eye, even ignoring or denigrating witnesses to the infidelity who wanted to go public. One of Hersh's assertions on his theme, however, is backed with erroneous references (and remains unsubstantiated). The author identified one Florence M. Kater as a "middle-aged housewife"^[30] who supposedly knew of Kennedy's womanizing during his 1960 presidential campaign. According to Hersh, this woman, who was allegedly the former landlady of JFK's senatorial aide/love interest Pamela Turnure, decided in 1959 to break the news on this topic. Inexplicably, "in late 1958" (the year before she decided to go public) she "ambushed Kennedy leaving the new apartment [to which Turnure allegedly moved to escape Kater's eavesdropping] at three A.M. and took a photograph of the unhappy senator attempting to shield his face with a handkerchief."^[31]

Hersh did not publish such a photograph in The Dark Side of Camelot or cite an interview with Florence Kater. She died many years before he started work on the book. If another writer or journalist ever interviewed her, Hersh did not use such a source. In the book he asserted that Kater had attended a 1960 presidential campaign stop near Washington, DC carrying a blow-up of her alleged photograph of an adulterous Sen. Kennedy attempting to shield his face.^[32]

"Kater was not taken seriously by the national press corps," wrote Hersh, "but she came close to attracting media attention. On May 14, 1960, just four days after Kennedy won the West Virginia primary, she approached him at a political rally at the University of Maryland carrying a placard with an enlarged snapshot of the early-morning scene outside Pamela Turnure's apartment. Kennedy ignored her, but a photograph of the encounter was published in the next afternoon's Washington Star, along with a brief story describing her as a heckler.".^[32] The microfilmed editions of May 14, 15 and 16 of the Washington Star, known at the time as the Evening Star of Washington, DC and The Sunday Star, do not contain such a photograph or brief story. Hersh could not have confused it with the Washington Post or The Washington Daily News because neither the name "Florence Kater" nor a photograph of her appeared in those newspapers, either, in connection with the May 14 event.

A month before the book's publication, newspapers, including USA Today, reported Hersh's announcement that he had removed from the galleys, at the last minute, a segment about legal documents allegedly containing JFK's signature.^[33] A paralegal named Lawrence Cusack had shared them with Hersh and encouraged the author to discuss them in the book.^[34] Shortly before Hersh's publicized announcement, federal investigators began probing Cusack's sale of the documents at auction.^[34] After The Dark Side of Camelot became a bestseller, Cusack was convicted by a federal jury in Manhattan of forging the documents and sentenced to a long prison term.^[35] The documents signed by "John F. Kennedy" included a provision, in 1960, for a trust fund to be set up for the institutionalized mother of Marilyn Monroe.^[34][36] In 1997 the Kennedy family denied Cusack's claim that his late father had been an attorney who had represented JFK in 1960.^[34]

Use of anonymous sources[link]

Some have criticized Hersh's use of anonymous sources in his reporting; implying that some of these sources are unreliable or even made up. In a review of Hersh's book, Chain of Command, commentator Amir Taheri wrote, "As soon as he has made an assertion he cites a 'source' to back it. In every case this is either an un-named former official or an unidentified secret document passed to Hersh in unknown circumstances... By my count Hersh has anonymous 'sources' inside 30 foreign governments and virtually every department of the U.S. government."^[37]

David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, maintains that he is aware of the identity of all of Hersh's unnamed sources, telling the Columbia Journalism Review that "I know every single source that is in his pieces.... Every 'retired intelligence officer,' every general with reason to know, and all those phrases that one has to use, alas, by necessity, I say, 'Who is it? What's his interest?' We talk it through."^[38]

In a response to an article in The New Yorker in which Hersh alleged that the U.S. government was planning a strike on Iran, U.S. Defense Department spokesman Brian Whitman said, "This reporter has a solid and well-earned reputation for making dramatic assertions based on thinly sourced, unverifiable anonymous sources."^[39]

Speeches[link]

Those who criticize Hersh's credibility especially point to allegations Hersh has made in public speeches and interviews, rather than in print. In an interview with New York magazine, Hersh made a distinction between the standards of strict factual accuracy for his print reporting and the leeway he allows himself in speeches, in which he may talk informally about stories still being worked on or blur information to protect his sources. "Sometimes I change events, dates, and places in a certain way to protect people... I can’t fudge what I write. But I can certainly fudge what I say."^[40]

Some of Hersh's speeches concerning the Iraq War have described violent incidents involving U.S. troops in Iraq. In July 2004, during the height of the Abu Ghraib scandal, he alleged that American troops sexually assaulted young boys:

In a subsequent interview with New York magazine, Hersh regretted that "I actually didn’t quite say what I wanted to say correctly...it wasn’t that inaccurate, but it was misstated. The next thing I know, it was all over the blogs. And I just realized then, the power of—and so you have to try and be more careful."^[40] In his book, Chain of Command, he wrote that one of the witness statements he had read described the rape of a boy by a foreign contract interpreter at Abu Ghraib, during which a woman took pictures.^[40]

Link between the US government and Fatah al-Islam[link]

In March 2007 Hersh asserted in a piece in The New Yorker that the United States and Saudi governments were funding the terrorist organization Fatah al-Islam through aid to Lebanese Sunni Prime Minister Fouad Siniora.^[41] Following the publishing of the story journalists in Beirut uncovered that Hersh put forth the claim without any reliable sources. Hersh had heard the unconfirmed story from Robert Fisk who had, in turn, heard the story from former British intelligence agent Alastair Crooke. Crooke had only heard it circulated as rumor and no one had fact checked the claims before Hersh ran the story^[42] which prompted a variety of criticisms.^[43]

Morarji Desai Libel Suit[link]

Hersh claimed in his 1983 book The Price of Power that former Indian Prime Minister Morarji Desai had been paid $20,000 a year by the CIA during the Johnson and Nixon administration. Desai called the allegation "a scandalous and malicious lie" and filed a $50 million libel suit against Hersh. By the time the case went to trial Desai, by then 93, was too ill to attend. CIA director Richard Helms and Henry Kissinger testified under oath that at no time did Desai act in any capacity for the CIA, paid or otherwise. Since Hersh did not have to take the stand or reveal the name of his alleged source, the Judge found in favor of Hersh.^[44][45]

Publications[link]

Books[link]

• Hersh, Seymour M. (1968), Chemical and Biological Warfare: America's Hidden Arsenal, New York, New York: Bobbs-Merrill (US) and London: MacGibbon & Kee (UK). ISBN 0-586-03295-9.
• Hersh, Seymour M. (1970). My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath. Random House. ISBN 0-394-43737-3.
• Hersh, Seymour M. (1972). Cover-up: the Army's secret investigation of the massacre at My Lai 4. Random House. ISBN 0-394-47460-0.
• Hersh, Seymour M. (1983). The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-44760-2. Excerpts from The Price of Power hosted by Third World Traveler
• Hersh, Seymour M. (1986). The Target Is Destroyed: What Really Happened to Flight 007 and What America Knew About It. Random House. ISBN 0-394-54261-4.
• Hersh, Seymour M. (1991). The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy. Random House. ISBN 0-394-57006-5.
• Hersh, Seymour M. (1997). The Dark Side of Camelot. Little, Brown & Company. ISBN 0-316-36067-8.
• Hersh, Seymour M. (1998). Against All Enemies: Gulf War Syndrome: The War Between America's Ailing Veterans and Their Government. Ballantine Books. ISBN 0-345-42748-3.
• Hersh, Seymour M. (2004). Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib. HarperCollins. ISBN 0-06-019591-6.
• Hersh, Seymour M. (TBD). [book on the Cheney vice presidency]^[46]

Articles/Reportage[link]

• "Full list of published articles in the New Yorker

• "Huge CIA Operation Reported in US against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents During Nixon Years" by Seymour Hersh, New York Times, December 22, 1974 — Hersh's article detailing CIA covert operations which eventually led to the formation of the Church Committee.

This section requires expansion.

Forewords[link]

• Hersh, Seymour M. (foreword) (2005) in Scott Ritter: Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein (Hardcover), Nation Books, ISBN 1-56025-852-7

See also[link]

• Church Committee (United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. Hersh's December 22, 1974 New York Times article on CIA operations was the main reason for the creation of this committee)
• Ari Ben-Menashe
• Mordechai Vanunu
• Robert Maxwell
• Opposition to war against Iran

References[link]

External links[link]

• Seymour Hersh at the Internet Movie Database
• Seymour Hersh Interviewed by Mehdi Hasan

Articles[link]

• "Current State of Investigating Reporting", talk given at BU, May 19 2009
• "The Traitor" — The case against Jonathan Pollard, The New Yorker, January 18, 1999 issue
• "Overwhelming Force" — What happened in the final days of the Gulf War?, The New Yorker, May 22, 2000 issue
• "The Cold Test" — What the Administration knew about Pakistan and the North Korean nuclear program., The New Yorker, January 27, 2003 issue
• "Lunch with the Chairman" — Why was Richard Perle meeting with Adnan Khashoggi?, The New Yorker, March 17, 2003 issue
• "Who Lied to Whom?" — Why did the Administration endorse a forgery about Iraq’s nuclear program?, The New Yorker, March 31, 2003 issue
• "Offense and Defense" — The battle between Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon., The New Yorker, April 7, 2003 issue
• "Selective Intelligence" — Selective Intelligence, The New Yorker, May 12, 2003 issue
• "The Syrian Bet" — Did the Bush Admin. burn a useful source on Al Qaeda? The New Yorker, July 28, 2003 issue
• "The Stovepipe" — How conflicts between the Bush Admin. and the intelligence community marred the reporting on Iraq’s weapons. The New Yorker, October 27, 2003 issue
• "Moving Targets" — Will the counter-insurgency plan in Iraq repeat the mistakes of Vietnam?. The New Yorker, December 15, 2003 issue
• "The Deal" — Why is Washington going easy on Pakistan’s nuclear black marketers? The New Yorker, March 8, 2004 issue
• "The Other War" — Why Bush’s Afghanistan problem won’t go away., The New Yorker, April 12, 2004 issue
• "Torture at Abu Ghraib" — American soldiers brutalized Iraqis. How far up does the responsibility go?, The New Yorker, May 10, 2004 issue
• "Chain of Command" — How the Department of Defense mishandled the disaster at Abu Ghraib, The New Yorker, May 17, 2004 issue
• "The Gray Zone" — How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib, The New Yorker, May 24, 2004 issue
• "Plan B" — As June 30 approaches, Israel looks to the Kurds, The New Yorker, June 28, 2004 issue
• "The Coming Wars" — What the Pentagon can now do in secret, The New Yorker, January 24, 2005 issue and the response by the Department of Defense
• "Watergate Days", The New Yorker, June 13, 2005 issue
• "Get Out the Vote" — Did Washington try to manipulate Iraq's Elections?, The New Yorker, July 25, 2005 issue
• "Up in the Air" — Where is the Iraq war headed next?, The New Yorker, December 5, 2005 issue
• "The Iran Plans" — Would President Bush go to war to stop Tehran from getting the bomb?, The New Yorker, April 17, 2006 issue
• "Last Stand" — The military's dissent on Iran policy., The New Yorker, July 10 & 17 2006 issue
• "Watching Lebanon" — Washington’s interests in Israel’s war., The New Yorker, August 21, 2006 issue
• "The Next Act" — Is a damaged Administration less likely to attack Iran, or more?, The New Yorker, November 27, 2006 issue
• "The Redirection" — Is the Administration’s new policy benefitting our enemies in the war on terrorism?, The New Yorker, March 5, 2007 issue
• "The General's Report" — How Antonio Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal, became one of its casualties, The New Yorker, June 25, 2007 issue
• "Shifting Targets" — The Administration’s plan for Iran, The New Yorker, October 8, 2007 issue
• "A Strike in the Dark" — What did Israel bomb in Syria?, The New Yorker, February 11, 2008 issue
• "Preparing the Battlefield" — The Bush Administration steps up its secret moves against Iran, The New Yorker, July 7, 2008 issue
• "Syria Calling" — The Obama Administration’s chance to engage in a Middle East peace, The New Yorker, April 6, 2009 issue
• "Defending the Arsenal" — In an unstable Pakistan, can nuclear warheads be kept safe?, The New Yorker, November 16, 2009 issue
• "The Online Threat" — Should we be worried about a cyber war?, The New Yorker, November 1, 2010 issue
• "Iran and the Bomb" — How real is the nuclear threat?, The New Yorker, June 6, 2011 issue

Isabel Wilkerson at the 2010 Texas Book Festival.

Isabel Wilkerson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and the author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration.

Biography[link]

Born in Washington D.C.in 1961, she studied journalism at Howard University, becoming editor-in-chief of the college newspaper The Hilltop. During college, Wilkerson interned at many publications, including the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post.^[1]

In 1994, while Chicago bureau chief of The New York Times, she became the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism,^[2] winning the feature writing award for her coverage of the 1993 midwestern floods and her profile of a 10-year-old boy who was responsible for his four siblings.^[3] Several of Wilkerson's articles are included in the book Pulitzer Prize Feature Stories: America's Best Writing, 1979 - 2003, edited by David Garlock.

Wilkerson has won a George S. Polk Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Journalist of the Year award from the National Association of Black Journalists.^[4][5][6]

She has also been the James M. Cox Professor of Journalism at Emory University, Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University and the Kreeger-Wolf endowed lecturer at Northwestern University and Professor of Journalism and Director of Narrative Nonfiction in the College of Communication at Boston University. She also served as a board member of the National Arts in Journalism Program at Columbia University.^[1][7]

After fifteen years of research and writing, she published, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration,^[8] which examines the three geographic routes that were commonly used by African Americans leaving the southern states between 1915 and the 1970s, illustrated through the personal stories of people who took those routes. During her research for the book, Wilkerson interviewed more than 1,000 people who made the migration from the South to Northern and Western cities.^[9] The book almost instantly hit number 5 on the NYT Bestseller list for nonfiction and has since been included in lists of best books of 2010 by many reviewers, including "The New York Times," "The Los Angeles Times," The New Yorker, Amazon.com, Salon.com,The Washington Post, The Economist, Atlanta Magazine, and The Daily Beast.^{[10][11][12][13][14][15]} In March 2011 the book won the National Book Critics Circle Award (Nonfiction). The book also won the Anisfield-Wolf Award for Nonfiction, the Mark Lynton History Prize, the Sidney Hillman Book Prize, the Heartland Prize for Nonfiction and was also the nonfiction runner up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize in 2011.

As of 2010, Wilkerson lived in the Virginia Highland neighborhood of Atlanta, and in a New York Times interview, remarked on being a part of a movement on the part of some African Americans to return to the South after generations in the North.^[16]

Bibliography[link]

Books[link]

• The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (Random House, 2010) ISBN 978-0-679-44432-9

Essays, Columns and Lectures[link]

• The New American Reader: Recent Periodical Essays, edited by Gilbert H. Muller (McGraw-Hill, 1997)
• "He Put a Spin on Design", in The Last Word: The New York Times Book of Obituaries and Farewells : a Celebration of Unusual Lives, edited by Marvin Siegel (William Morrow, 1997)
• "Superstars of Dreamland", in Best American Movie Writing, edited by George Plimpton (St. Martin’s Press, 1998)
• We Americans: Celebrating a Nation, Its People and Its Past, edited by Thomas B. Allen and Charles O. Hyman (National Geographic Society, 1999)
• "Two Boys, a Debt, a Gun, a Victim: The Face of Violence", in Writing the World: Reading and Writing about Issues of the Day, edited by Charles R. Cooper, Susan Peck MacDonald (Macmillan, 2000 ISBN 0-312-26008-3)
• Written into History: Pulitzer Prize Reporting of the Twentieth Century, edited by Anthony Lewis (Times Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2001)
• "First Born, Fast Grown: The Manful Life of Nicholas, 10", in Feature Writing for Newspapers and Magazines: The Pursuit of Excellence, edited by Edward Jay Friedlander and John Lee (HarperCollins College Publishers, 1997); and The Princeton Anthology of Writing, edited by John McPhee and Carol Rigolot (Princeton University Press, 2001)
• Various articles, Pulitzer Prize Feature Stories: America's Best Writing, 1979 - 2003, edited by David Garlock (Iowa State University Press, 1998; Wiley-Blackwell; 2nd edition, April 18, 2003)
• "Interviewing Sources", Spring 2002 Nieman Narrative Journalism Conference Report
• "Angela Whitiker's Climb", in Class Matters, by correspondents of The New York Times (Times Books, 2005)
• "Interviewing: Accelerated Intimacy", in Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers' Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University, edited by Mark Kramer and Wendy Call (Plume Penguin Books, January 30, 2007)

Awards[link]

• 1993 George S. Polk Award for Regional Reporting, in The New York Times
• 1994 Pulitzer Prize in Journalism for Feature Writing
• 1994 Journalist of the Year award from the National Association of Black Journalists
• 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award (Nonfiction), winner, The Warmth of Other Suns
• 2011 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work Debut Author, nominated, The Warmth of Other Suns
• 2011 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, winner, The Warmth of Other Suns.

References[link]

External links[link]

• Isabel Wilkerson Tracks Exodus of Blacks from US South - video interview by Democracy Now!
• Time: Isabel Wilkerson on Black America's Immigration Story
• The Lives Gained by Fleeing Jim Crow By Janet Maslin, New York Times Book Review
• Works by or about Isabel Wilkerson in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• C-SPAN Q&A interview with Wilkerson, September 26, 2010